"Let no freedom be allowed to novelty, because it is not fitting that any addition should be made to antiquity. Let not the clear faith and belief of our forefathers be fouled by any muddy admixture."
-- Pope Sixtus III

Al Armendariz, the Environmental Protection Agency official at the
center of a budding scandal surrounding a 2010 video in which he said
the EPA should "crucify" polluters, has resigned.

Armendariz, head of the EPA's South and Southwest region in Dallas, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson late Sunday informing her of his decision to step down.

"As I have expressed publicly, and to you directly, I regret comments
I made several years ago that do not in any way reflect my work as
regional administrator," he wrote. "As importantly, they do not
represent the work you have overseen as E.P.A. administrator."

Samuel Coleman, who served as the
EPA's senior federal official in New Orleans during the agency's
response to Hurricane Katrina, will replace Armendariz as acting administrator.

Republicans, already critical of what they call the Obama
administration's war on energy, seized upon the video when it surfaced
last week, calling for Armendariz to resign.

According to the Associated Press,
Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe led the charge, pointing to Armendariz's May
2010 speech as proof of the "EPA's assault on energy, particularly the
technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking."

Inhofe's office
uploaded the clip, shown above, [Go search for it yourself, kiddies. I'm not in the mood. - F.G.] to YouTube.

Armendariz was appointed regional chief by President Barack Obama in 2009.

But "before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief," Brant Hargrove wrote in the Dallas Observer,
"he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution
caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state
office overseeing some of the industry's most important drilling
grounds."

* Dumbo the Presiphant is an Asian presiphant, of course. An African presiphant would be racist.

The former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez says President Obama is waging the nation's war against radical Islam in a far more brutal manner than his predecessor President George W. Bush.

"We don't capture anybody any more," Rodriguez told 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl on Sunday.
"Their default option of this Administration has been to ... take no
prisoners ... How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than
capture them? I never understood that one."

Those remarks by Rodriguez have been largely overshadowed by his more controversial defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which is laid out in his new book out today called Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives. But what was interesting to observe last night was the overlap in views by advocates of enhanced interrogation (a.k.a. torture) such as Rodriguez and opponents of such tactics, like your Glenn Greenwalds
and Ron Pauls, who essentially agree on one important point: It's
better to capture suspected terrorists and draw out information from
them than assassinate them without due process.

The latest high-profile case to raise this issue was the assassination
of American-born YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by Hellfire missiles
fired from a drone in September. There wasn't a move to attempt to
interview al-Awlaki, he was just blown to smithereens. And to many civil
libertarians, that exercise of power against an American citizen is far
more threatening than what we saw from the Bush administration. "How
can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention
powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions
without judicial review?" Greenwald wrote at the time.
"How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on
Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable
assertion of war powers?"

It's a valid point and will likely continue to gain traction as
Rodriguez launches his book tour. Clearly, however, it's not the focus
of Rodriguez's spiel, which is a larger defense of enhanced
interrogation. On that front, he's got more of an uphill battle. As Reuters reported Friday, Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats
are about to end their almost three-year-long investigation of
"enhanced interrogation" and will report that it had little success in
eliciting intelligence. "One official said investigators found 'no
evidence' such enhanced interrogations played 'any significant role' in
the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and
killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs," reported Mark Hosenball.
While that report doesn't bode well for Rodriguez's case, neither did
his vague pronouncement that the enhanced interrogation "saved lives."
With the lack of specifics in his 60 Minutes interview,
supporters of torture had probably better hope there's more in his book
to make the case.

About Me

First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct.
"My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up.
What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.